Extracting leadership lessons from this strange tale—40-plus years of roller coasters, intrigue, and management fog—is an interesting task. “Apple management,” Guy Kawasaki said at an Atlanta gathering in 1995, at the bottom of the bottom of the company’s fortunes: “It’s an oxymoron.” Nevertheless, here are 15 conclusions we can make about leadership, based on the Apple experience:

■ Run for the beach! No! Run for the hills!

A lack of leadership can be a terrible thing, especially during natural disasters and manmade cataclysms.

■ Look for the adult supervision in the back of the garage.

Apple was made possible not only by boy geniuses, but also by seasoned pros. Strong leadership doesn’t necessarily strut its stuff.

■ Note to would-be CEOs: If you don’t control much votingstock, get a good bead on those who do.

You need to be the leader. Will you be able to lead, or will the 400-pound gorilla/ major shareholder get in your way?

Cool is an elusive quality. It’s something that you can try to cultivate—in yourself, in your company—but at the end of the day, it really only exists in the eye of the beholder. Getting cool right, therefore, is hard. But blowing your cool is easy.

Here are eight Apple lessons in cool (and uncool):

■ Don’t get pot-bound.

Even if you’ve got a good thing going today, in terms of your corporate image, it will almost certainly have to change tomorrow. If you have to migrate from warm to cool, migrate.

■ Cool is a double-edged sword.

If you cultivate cool, and then you act uncool, it’s confusing and disturbing.

■ Cultivate your cool by cultivating thought-leaders.

This is one of the most important lessons that Apple learned early. If you want—like the Irish—to “fight above your weight,” you need an oversized image.

■ If your product is all about being user-friendly, your adsshould probably show your product being user-friendly.

What does the tangled tale of Apple’s distribution and retailing efforts tell us? It tells us that consistency is important in dealing with retail channels that you don’t control. It tells us that selling personal computers can be harder than selling products in slower-moving industries like cars, even though selling cars is plenty hard. And it tells us that at the end of the day, cachet counts. And inspiration counts even more.

Eight specific lessons jump out of the preceding chapter:

■ Sell your geniuses at retail.

Spend the time and money to develop a sales force that’s (at least) as good as your product. (Even the best products can’t sell themselves, especially if they’re intimidating.) Make your “geniuses” out to be scarce commodities, for example, with a sign-up sheet.

■ Retailing experts are like any other experts. Sometimes they get it really wrong.

In May 2001, the pundits were predicting that Apple’s retail gambit was going to prove an unmitigated disaster.

Wrong!

■ Be nice to nerds, but don’t let them do your marketing.

Let’s face it: engineers, for all of their many virtues, don’t speak “marketing.”